Beth Reid

Expertise

Beth was previously was a Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics and BIDS Data Science Fellow. She is currently a Senior Quantitative Researcher at The Climate Corporation.

At Berkeley, Beth focused on extracting as much information as possible from three-dimensional maps of galaxies, including measurements of the expansion history of the Universe and the behavior of gravity on cosmological scales. She led the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) team's efforts to create, publicly release, and document uniform catalogs suitable for statistical analyses for the completed survey. Her work has also focused on developing a new framework to analyze the small-scale clustering properties of galaxies, far from the linear, Gaussian distribution on larger scales. This problem comes with its own data science challenges in analyzing simulations efficiently enough to directly compare against the data while marginalizing over a set of nuisance parameters. The final result is a measurement of the growth rate of cosmic structure with a factor of 2 improvement in precision over previous analyses. Beth obtained her PhD in physics at Princeton. She was a Hubble Fellow at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab before joining the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics as a data science fellow.